Pit stops

Once again, plenty of drivers were able to make very early stops for tyres and run to the end of the race without a further pit stop.

Bridgestone brought the super-soft and soft tyres to this race last year. Had they done the same this year instead of swapping the soft for the medium it might have been harder for drivers to use such strategies.

NB. Adrian Sutil, Sebastien Buemi, Vitaly Petrov, Nico H?â??lkenberg and Heikki Kovalainen’s lap three pit stops all appear to be missing from the list of pit stops published by the FIA.

I seem to recall that Hamilton, at some point after the first safety car, was some 22 or 23 seconds ahead of Webber. With Webber surely to close that gap after he got by Barrichello, I was expecting to see Hamilton come in for his new rubber at that stage, possibly getting out ahead of Webber.

By waiting as long as they did, no way was that going to happen. A tactical error by McLaren, in my opinion.Schooner

It’s a fair question but Hamilton was never actually far enough ahead of Webber to be able to make his pit stop and get back out in front.

He lost 29.3 seconds to Webber when he pitted, and as you can see from the chart above he never had that much of an advantage. His lead over Webber peaked at 24.253s on lap 23.

The only way McLaren could have kept Hamilton in front of Webber would have been to pit him (or Button) on lap three when Webber came in as well.

This underlines how big a gamble it was for Webber to pit that early, and how well he made it work by passing Kamui Kobayashi and Michael Schumacher.

If those two drivers hadn’t made their mistakes at turn three which allowed Webber to pass them, his gamble would not have paid off.

Lap chart

Lap chart

Post-race penalties for Sutil and H?â??lkenberg promoted Massa from tenth to eighth after he’d started 24th.

But little of his progress came as a result of overtaking moves outside of the first lap. His significant gains of position away from pit stops came at the expense of Vitaly Petrov and Timo Glock when they were pushed wide by other rivals.

Ferrari’s strategy of pitting him on lap one would probably have worked much better for him had so many other drivers not pitted lap three.

The title to this post, and the picture, begs a simple answer “Because Webber hit him.”

But, seriously, The McLarens were in their own drifting competition. It was ridiculous if you watched the in car cameras; you thought you were watching an HRT. If Hamilton had got by Webber, even with Webber’s shot tires, Webber would have been all over him for the rest of the way, and, frankly, given the nature of those two guys, it would have thus come to tears one way or another.

I really feel like in two races running McLaren have got it totally wrong on their tire performance analysis and resulting strategy. If it was true that the hard was faster in Monza, they waited until it was too late to exploit the advantage. In Singapore, they didn’t realize unitl it was way too late that they were dropping multiple seconds to RBR in race conditions on the softs.